The Grim Sleeper: Five Disorders That Make For Scary Slumbering

Following up on our field trip to MetroNaps, let's examine the dark side of sleep. Back in Volume 3, Issue 1 ("Our Worst Issue"), Dr. Ken Carter discussed five sleep disorders that will keep you up at night. Which could be a good thing.

Five Disorders That Make for Scary Slumbering

by Ken Carter, Ph.D.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, up to 72 percent of us experience some symptoms of a sleep disorder at least a few nights a week. People with chronic symptoms, however, can develop a sleep disorder that interferes with their lives on a daily basis, leaving them impaired and miserable. For most, it's insomnia. For others, the problem is much more unique.

1. Sleep Eating
Nocturnal Sleep-Related Eating Disorder, or Sleep Eating, is a condition similar to sleepwalking in which affected people will engage in nightly noshing while partially or totally asleep. The most common Sleep Eating episodes entail a person sleepwalking to the refrigerator and munching on a midnight snack that they'll probably never remember. Other times, the episodes are more elaborate, and the fully asleep sufferers head to the kitchen to chop, stir-fry, bake or bust out the George Foreman. In fact, reports indicate that up to one-third of Sleep Eaters have hurt themselves while preparing or eating food (which is actually really low when you think about grillin' up food Emeril-style while unconscious—bam!).

The disorder is fairly rare, occurring in only about one and a half percent of the population. Two out of three people with Sleep Eating are women, and three out of four eat nightly (some up to eight times a night). Most of them (84 percent) are completely unaware of their nighttime snacks. And ironically, in almost all cases, the behavior doesn't appear to be hunger-related.

To make things even more strange, the food choices of Sleep Eaters can be, at times, very peculiar. Case studies have revealed nighttime meals that include cat food, raw chicken, coffee grounds and milk, sandwiches made with fistfuls of salt, and even inedibles such as ammonia or buttered soda cans.

Keep reading for Sleep Paralysis, Sexsomnia and more...

2. Sleep Paralysis During normal sleep, your brain sends a signal to your body to inhibit your movement while you're dreaming. This keeps you from thrashing around and possibly hurting yourself. But when Sleep Paralysis occurs, the brain either switches on your muscle inhibition feature too soon or doesn't switch it off when you wake up, which can lead to very creepy experiences. In addition to being unable to move, many people will dream while they're awake — basically hallucinating. The most common hallucinations that occur with Sleep Paralysis include sensing or seeing another person in the room, being touched, hearing footsteps, floating, or even hearing someone call your name. And for some people, the sensation is so strong they think they've had a stroke and are really paralyzed. Episodes of Sleep Paralysis can last anywhere from 10 seconds to a terrifying 70 minutes.

But it could never happen to you, right? Wrong. Studies suggest that about half of us have experienced at least one episode of hypnagogic Sleep Paralysis, the kind that occurs soon after we fall asleep. Chronic Sleep Paralysis, however, only affects about six percent of adults. Generally, the disorder is related to jet lag, sleep deprivation, stress or even your sleeping position. It's believed that supine sleep (sleeping on your back) can make a person five times more likely to have an episode of Sleep Paralysis than any other position.

If you do happen to wake one morning and find yourself paralyzed, try wiggling your toes. The paralysis seems to affect larger muscles more than smaller ones, so a good way to get out of it is to try to make small movements. If that doesn't work, check for a crazed Kathy Bates lurching around your room Ã la Misery, and make sure your ankles are still intact.

3. SexsomniaIt's embarrassing enough to be told that you snore or mumble in your sleep, but imagine being told that you take off all your clothes, moan in ecstasy, and sometimes even pleasure yourself—all without any memory of doing so. This is what happens with Sexsomnia.

Researchers at the Sleep Disorder Center at Stanford University have classified the sexual behaviors that occur during sleep into three categories. The first involves actions that the researchers describe as "annoying," though not harmful. Cases in this category include sexual moaning loud enough to be heard in adjoining rooms, attempts to remove clothing, and mumbling sexually inappropriate phrases. The second category includes behaviors that are also considered annoying but are, at times, harmful to the person suffering from Sexsomnia. Often, this involves violent masturbation that can cause bruising and soreness the next morning. The last, and most severe, category is for actions that are harmful to others. These cases involve inappropriate and violent sexual behavior.

When confronted, people with Sexsomnia have no memory of their actions and become confused and embarrassed. One case study described a man who was so ashamed of his uncontrollable sexual behavior that he refused to share a bed with his wife and would restrain himself during the night to prevent any inappropriate conduct. But even that didn't work. According to the researchers, on one particular evening his Sexsomnia desires were so forceful that he not only broke his restraints, but also two fingers.

Most bed partners of those with Sexsomnia find the behavior disquieting and unwelcome. There have even been cases of arrest for sexual battery. Other cases aren't quite as severe, and the episodes of Sexsomnia may be indistinguishable from sex when awake. One woman didn't realize that her husband was suffering from Sexsomnia for months. Finally one night, she clued in when she noticed something different about her husband while they were having sex: he was snoring.

Some people think that the diagnosis of Sexsomnia is used to justify inappropriate sexual advances. However, in nearly every case, doctors were able to document abnormal patterns of REM (rapid eye movement) or non-REM sleep, something impossible to fake. The majority of cases also had other psychiatric diagnoses. Fortunately, most patients with Sexsomnia can be successfully treated with psychotropic medications.

4. Pseudoinsomnia We've all had nights where we just couldn't seem to get to sleep. We toss and turn, punch our pillows, count sheep, and wonder what shirt will go best with the dark circles under our eyes the next morning. This is classic insomnia, a condition that an estimated 20 million people experience on a nightly or nearly nightly basis. Strangely, roughly five percent of these insomnia sufferers actually sleep much better than they realize. Why? They don't have insomnia, but instead a condition known as Sleep State Misperception, or Pseudoinsomnia. People with this disorder have vivid dreams about not being able to sleep: tossing and turning and counting those sheep. Consequently, they wake the next morning feeling exhausted and believing they spent the entire night wide awake.

Often a bed partner discovers the disorder by assuring their mate that he or she is actually sleeping through the night. Other times, it's diagnosed by a physician, but usually only after prescriptions for typical sleep inducers seem to fail. Luckily, the simple diagnosis of Pseudoinsomnia is usually enough to do the trick in curing the disorder.

5. Sleep TerrorsEveryone knows that nightmares can be horrifying. You wake terrified, sometimes in the midst of your own screaming, remembering vividly disturbing images. That's when it's time to crawl into bed with Mom and Dad. But nightmares, which occur late in our sleep cycles, are a lot different from Sleep Terrors, which happen earlier during non-REM sleep. People with Sleep Terrors experience sudden episodes of concentrated fright. To an observer, they will seem awake, but they're not. With eyes wide open, their breathing is intense and their heart rate has shot through the roof. They might even scream at the top of their lungs in fear, look panicked, and act as if they're in excruciating pain.

It's okay to wake them "¦ if you can. But it's very difficult to rouse some sleepers out of one of these episodes. When they do wake up, most of the time they have no memory of the experience or the emotional upheaval it caused them (and most likely, the people around them).

Sleep Terrors usually occur in kids. About three percent of children report having at least one attack. For adults, it's even more infrequent, with less than one percent experiencing Sleep Terrors.

Soon, the dogs you see sniffing out contraband at airports may not be searching for drugs or smuggled Spanish ham. They might be looking for stolen treasures.

K-9 Artifact Finders, a new collaboration between New Hampshire-based cultural heritage law firm Red Arch and the University of Pennsylvania, is training dogs to root out stolen antiquities looted from archaeological sites and museums. The dogs would be stopping them at borders before the items can be sold elsewhere on the black market.

The illegal antiquities trade nets more than $3 billion per year around the world, and trafficking hits countries dealing with ongoing conflict, like Syria and Iraq today, particularly hard. By one estimate, around half a million artifacts were stolen from museums and archaeological sites throughout Iraq between 2003 and 2005 alone. (Famously, the craft-supply chain Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million in 2017 for buying thousands of ancient artifacts looted from Iraq.) In Syria, the Islamic State has been known to loot and sell ancient artifacts including statues, jewelry, and art to fund its operations.

But the problem spans across the world. Between 2007 and 2016, U.S. Customs and Border Control discovered more than 7800 cultural artifacts in the U.S. looted from 30 different countries.

Penn Vet Working Dog Center

K-9 Artifact Finders is the brainchild of Rick St. Hilaire, the executive director of Red Arch. His non-profit firm researches cultural heritage property law and preservation policy, including studying archaeological site looting and antiquities trafficking. Back in 2015, St. Hilaire was reading an article about a working dog trained to sniff out electronics that was able to find USB drives, SD cards, and other data storage devices. He wondered, if dogs could be trained to identify the scents of inorganic materials that make up electronics, could they be trained to sniff out ancient pottery?

To find out, St. Hilaire tells Mental Floss, he contacted the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, a research and training center for detection dogs. In December 2017, Red Arch, the Working Dog Center, and the Penn Museum (which is providing the artifacts to train the dogs) launched K-9 Artifact Finders, and in late January 2018, the five dogs selected for the project began their training, starting with learning the distinct smell of ancient pottery.

“Our theory is, it is a porous material that’s going to have a lot more odor than, say, a metal,” says Cindy Otto, the executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center and the project’s principal investigator.

As you might imagine, museum curators may not be keen on exposing fragile ancient materials to four Labrador retrievers and a German shepherd, and the Working Dog Center didn’t want to take any risks with the Penn Museum’s priceless artifacts. So instead of letting the dogs have free rein to sniff the materials themselves, the project is using cotton balls. The researchers seal the artifacts (broken shards of Syrian pottery) in airtight bags with a cotton ball for 72 hours, then ask the dogs to find the cotton balls in the lab. They’re being trained to disregard the smell of the cotton ball itself, the smell of the bag it was stored in, and ideally, the smell of modern-day pottery, eventually being able to zero in on the smell that distinguishes ancient pottery specifically.

Penn Vet Working Dog Center

“The dogs are responding well,” Otto tells Mental Floss, explaining that the training program is at the stage of "exposing them to the odor and having them recognize it.”

The dogs involved in the project were chosen for their calm-but-curious demeanors and sensitive noses (one also works as a drug-detection dog when she’s not training on pottery). They had to be motivated enough to want to hunt down the cotton balls, but not aggressive or easily distracted.

Right now, the dogs train three days a week, and will continue to work on their pottery-detection skills for the first stage of the project, which the researchers expect will last for the next nine months. Depending on how the first phase of the training goes, the researchers hope to be able to then take the dogs out into the field to see if they can find the odor of ancient pottery in real-life situations, like in suitcases, rather than in a laboratory setting. Eventually, they also hope to train the dogs on other types of objects, and perhaps even pinpoint the chemical signatures that make artifacts smell distinct.

Pottery-sniffing dogs won’t be showing up at airport customs or on shipping docks soon, but one day, they could be as common as drug-sniffing canines. If dogs can detect low blood sugar or find a tiny USB drive hidden in a house, surely they can figure out if you’re smuggling a sculpture made thousands of years ago in your suitcase.